Daily Dose of English 130
Coffee
Daily Dose of English 130
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you can make it today. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about coffee, which surprises me that I haven't talked about. Have I really not talked about this yet? Coffee. Yeah, it's not, oh shoot, I've talked about morning coffee. Oh no, episode 12. Okay, it's been over 100 episodes since then. I'll make an exception. Why did I call it Morning Coffee? What a weird name for an episode. Why not just Coffee? Well, all right, whatever. We're sort of repeating things. I'm sure I've done that already. I don't know. I just think of things in my life when I come up with an episode name, and then I talk about it a bit. The things that are common in my life, like coffee, are bound to come up multiple times. Maybe I'll talk about something different. I don't know. I have no idea what I talked about, but let's talk generally about coffee. Coffee is a wonderful beverage that I drink pretty much every single day. It's quite rare that I don't have a cup of coffee, usually if I'm quite sick or something. And I really like it. I really enjoy my coffee. As I've said before, I take my time to grind the beans and make my coffee in a nice way. And I think that's something that is really helpful for me in the morning. I don't actually have a ton of reaction to caffeine at my current age and weight and stuff, so I don't really feel a huge difference if I do and don't drink coffee, but I really like it. I like the process of making coffee. I like the taste and the warmth, especially. I really like having warm, hot coffee or hot coffee, really, in the morning. I also like taking coffee breaks to go get coffee, and I think it's a generally really nice thing to have. Today I want to talk a little bit about making coffee, I guess. I don't think I've talked about this a ton, but there's a bunch of different methods for making coffee. So the way that I use pretty much every single day is called pour over. So pour over is when you have a conical filter, which is a cone, that's where the word conical comes from, a cone filter that you put in a It's called a carafe, again, another fancy word that you don't need to know, but it's basically a big old thing to catch the coffee in. Then I grind the beans, I put the beans in, and I put hot water in, and a couple of different steps to make coffee. I pour the water over the coffee. That's a very easy way to make coffee. I use it because I can make coffee for two people at the same time, and it's good coffee. It doesn't do anything weird to the coffee, and it ends up being really quite good. My favorite way to make coffee, though, is actually called an AeroPress, which if you don't love coffee but you wanna try it, this can be a really good way to make it because it makes really, really tasty coffee. I honestly think that AeroPress coffee is the tastiest coffee that I've ever had because it does a good job at extracting a lot of the good coffee flavors without leaving it in the water for too long to really start to take out bitterness or acidity or whatever. So, if you're somebody who doesn't love coffee because it's been bad wherever you get it, but you like are interested in trying, find a friend or somebody who you know that has an AeroPress or you can actually go to a lot of cafes these days and ask for a specific kind of preparation method. So an AeroPress is really nice, and it's actually a very simple machine. It's sort of just a tube of plastic with a filter that you can put at the bottom, then a tube, and then the thing that you push down on, which actually pushes the air against the water and the coffee to push it out through the coffee. And so that's where the name Aero comes from, because it uses air to push out the coffee rather than like a French press, for example, which is another great method of making coffee where you completely cover the coffee in water, you let it sit, and then you kind of push down this top part, which then just filters out the beans, the ground beans, the ground coffee from the water, and then you pour it out into a cup. I like French presses, but I just don't like them for a daily cup of coffee. They're a little annoying. They get really cold quickly, so you can't just sip a little bit at a time. They're useful, and they're nice to have. They're not a terrible option, but I don't even own a French press, so I don't find them to be required for coffee enjoyers, I guess. Actually, I mean most types of coffee makers I don't own, but anyways. Another one that I don't own is called a Chemex. I believe this is from a German company. It's similar to a pour over, but there's a little bit of difference to it on the shape, which drastically changes how the coffee is brewed. It ends up creating a very different flavor profile. There's a lot of people who really like the Chemex. I've tried it a couple times and it's fine. I don't really see a huge difference with it and like pour over, for example, and they're a lot more expensive. They're a little more annoying to use. So if you have a Chemex and you like it, awesome, that's great. I think they look cool for sure, but I just don't see a huge difference in the quality of coffee that they produce and I prefer an Aeropress. But they're definitely fun to look at. There's also, let's see, there's other ones like espresso is a good one. Espresso is very, very popular and famous in the world. And it's when you essentially have a very firm, packed bit of coffee that you turn essentially into like a puck is what they call it, a puck of coffee. And a puck is like a round, small cylindrical object. So if you've ever watched hockey, ice hockey, they play with a puck. but a puck of coffee and then water is forced through it at very high pressures in order to extract the coffee as quickly as possible is the idea. An espresso shot takes a couple seconds to pull, in comparison, depending on what you use and how, like there's a ton of different factors that you can play with to get different flavors, but it can take less, it takes less than 30 seconds usually to get to pull a shot of espresso. I sometimes like espresso, like raw, just like plain espresso. It really depends on the espresso. I find that it can be really quite acidic sometimes, which I don't love, but I really like Americanos. Americanos are espresso with hot water, which is, I believe it was invented in Italy when American soldiers were there in some one of the world wars. I don't remember what it was. But the Italians would drink their coffee just like that, as an espresso, right? But then the Americans were used to drip coffee, which is what we often drink in diners or like in every restaurant here. And so they wanted a sort of a closer to a drip coffee. So they just added hot water to the espresso and made an Americano. It does taste different than an Americano. I think that is, sorry, it does taste different from drip coffee, which I like as well, but I think I would prefer an Americano. I prefer an Americano if I can, because it has a bit more rich flavor of coffee, like from the espresso, than like your typical drip coffee. But I will say that that's usually because drip coffee is not very good if you go to a restaurant or a random coffee stand on the street or something like that. And so I think the quality of Americanos is just typically higher than a drip coffee. However, drip coffee is very nice for if you're traveling somewhere and there's like just a cheap coffee machine, they're very easy to do and you make pretty good coffee if you're at home. It's like when you go to a place where that's had the drip coffee on for five hours where it's like tastes kind of bad or it's like really cheap coffee. I have a drip coffee machine because it was like $15 and it's really nice for making coffee when I have multiple people over. Because if everybody wants coffee, I don't wanna get out a coffee, like my AeroPress, and make everybody an individual cup of coffee. I'd much rather just do a bunch at once, and then everybody can have as much coffee as they want. It's a lot easier of a process to do. Yeah, I don't know if I can think of any other methods of making coffee. Oh, instant coffee, that's one. Instant coffee, I don't like. I think it tastes bad. I think it tastes sort of artificial and sort of like, I don't know. I just don't like the taste of it. I understand that it can be good. It's actually great for flavoring. If you wanna put coffee flavor into something, it's fantastic. I use a little bit of instant coffee in chocolate cake, makes it really good. And if you wanna make like a coffee flavored beverage, it can also be really nice. However, if I want like a cup of coffee, I'm just never gonna make myself a cup of instant coffee because it's not that good and it's not like cheaper. Instant coffee is often more expensive and it ends up having worse coffee. I'd much rather spend the five minutes to make myself a cup of coffee than have a worse cup of coffee for more money, if that makes any sense. So I don't really like instant coffee. I often recommend that people make their own coffee instead of doing instant coffee. I do understand if you really just want a hot cup of coffee, if you wanna do that, go ahead. I'm not gonna judge you or anything like that. I personally prefer to make my own coffee. But anyways, that's all the time that I have. I hope that you enjoyed this episode of me rambling about different ways to make coffee. And I want to know, let me know down in the comments, do you drink coffee and how do you make your coffee every morning or afternoon or whenever? But anyways, I'll see you again tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye.
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